Claire Warner

If you’ve ever tried to find books that deal with sexuality in any meaningful way — or even if you’ve simply looked for a book featuring LGBTQIA characters in the first place — you’ve probably noticed a trend: Most LGBTQ media is depressing as fuck.

Greedy. Confused. Slutty. If you’re bisexual, chances are you’ve heard these labels (and worse) thrown at you from all sides, probably even by people you consider friends.

Even setting aside the dystopian hellscape that American national politics have become, it’s been a tough year across the board. That being said, 2016 wasn’t actually the worst year in history. Some things were disastrous, of course, but focusing on the negatives doesn’t do any good. At the risk of sounding cliché, if 2017 is going to be any better, we can’t lose hope.

It would be easy to point to my mother as the originator of my lifelong feminism. She kept her last name when my parents married in the ‘80s, refused to perpetuate schoolyard gender norms, and encouraged my sister and me not to let anyone limit us by our gender... My mother may have been the louder influence, but ignoring my father’s impact does us both a disservice.

Keeping a journal has become an especially calming habit — one I plan to continue for the foreseeable future.

There is such a dearth of female historical figures that the natural inclination is to assume everything important was said or done by men; barring that, it’s to attribute it to the same rotation of important women in history: Eleanor Roosevelt, Marilyn Monroe, Cleopatra, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and so on.